[SOLVED] update killed CUPS and printing

After the recent rolling updates, I lost my printer. System system settings showed error like print service unavailable bad file. Ocular was saying [quote]Could not print the document. Detailed error is “Could not find a suitable binary for printing. Make sure CUPS lpr binary is available”.[/quote]

I found some references like
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1462704
https://forum.manjaro.org/index.php?topic=17670.0

I’m a hack, but this is basically what I did to get printing back:
[list]
[]Used octopi to install cups
[
]I tired some fo the commands in the above refences (not all of them worked - got some errors.
[]Went to http://localhost:631
[
]Added printer, where it found Discovered Network Printers: Brother MFC-J625DW
[/list]

Seems to work OK, now (although I haven’t rebooted yet)
Cheers

The Arch forum post link that you provided was about Cups 2.0.0 but cups in Netrunner Rolling (Manjaro) is still using version 1.7.5 which hasn’t received an update since July. The only cups package that received an update was the cups-filters package, so It couldn’t have been cups itself that caused your issue.

Did you by chance install your printer using this AUR package?
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brother-mfc-j625dw/

You can also install the scanner from the AUR:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brscan4/
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brscan4-network/

And here are the fax drivers from the AUR::
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brmfcfaxcups/

To be honest I can’t tell for sure from my notes. I suspect I didn’t, because at time I didn’t even know what yaourt was :stuck_out_tongue:

If I didn’t use the AUR, could that be why it broke ability to print?

Thanks!

The standard cups drivers / filters (gutenprint, hplip and foomatic) don’t have support for the MFC-J625DW printer and should not work without the Brother printer drivers installed from the AUR.

I definitely had installed the brother drivers, just not from the AUR. It was probably directly from the brother website.

Printer was working fine, until the last system updates. that is when I did those couple of steps to get printing working again.

Cheers!

You manually installed the printer drivers, man that must have been fun, LOL :smiley:

I have solved this, but to follow-up on my cups difficulties:
Since my last fiddling with cups back in Nov 2014, I had to manually start cups after every reboot using

sudo systemctl start org.cups.cupsd.service

Back in Nov 2014 when I installed cups to get my printer working again, it apparently installed cups 2.0. From the arch wiki:

[quote]CUPS daemon
Note: With cups 2.0.0, the service name has been changed to org.cups.cupsd.service. This version is available in extra as of October 31, 2014. When upgrading, it is necessary to manually disable the previous cups.service, otherwise broken symbolic links will be left in /etc/systemd/system/ subdirectories and systemd will warn about non-existent services.
[/quote]

So from: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/165862/printing-problem-with-archlinux-and-gnome-3-14-and-cups-service I ran these and cups seems working at boot and everything is fine:

systemctl disable cups.service systemctl enable org.cups.cupsd.service systemctl daemon-reload systemctl start org.cups.cupsd.service

Cheers.

I’m glad to see you fixed your issue.

That was a known issue with cups 2.0 and the manjaro-system script package was supposed to fix this issue for us, but in certain situation this didn’t work properly and needed to be done manually anyway.

This fix was posted several times in the Manjaro forums and I did post it in this forum a couple of times as well:
http://forums.netrunner-os.com/showthread.php?tid=17042&pid=25112#pid25112
http://forums.netrunner-os.com/showthread.php?tid=16703&pid=24349#pid24349

Please keep in mind that Netrunner Rolling is based on Manjaro and as such you can always refer to their wiki pages for help: https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
I’d recommend giving it a quick read anyway as it is a great resource of information.

Also keep an eye out in this forum for update-pack and security update announcements prior to running them, Just in case there are any additional steps required for success.

[quote=“chatan, post:3, topic:2777”]

[quote]Did you by chance install your printer using this AUR package?
brother-mfc-j625dw[/quote]
To be honest I can’t tell for sure from my notes. I suspect I didn’t, because at time I didn’t even know what yaourt was [/quote]

Starting to get off the original topic, but I had to reinstall my netrunner rolling so I’ll post this in case someone stumbles across it in their brother printer install adventures:
So I tried…

yaourt -S brother-mfc-j625dw BUT….
timeout error on trying to get dependency: deb2targz, so I download it from a site given in comments of https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/deb2targz/
then…

sudo pacman -U /home/user/Downloads/deb2targz-0.1-7-any.pkg.tar.xz

That deb2targz dependency installed OK, so I tried again:

yaourt -S brother-mfc-j625dw Wouldn’t work:
==> Building and installing package
==> ERROR: Missing package() function in /tmp/yaourt-tmp-user/

So I found notes from before. This is what worked:yaourt -S dpkg
From brother website downloaded the deb version of the “Driver Install Tool” for my model, then…

gunzip linux-brprinter-installer-2.0.0-1.gz

sudo bash linux-brprinter-installer-2.0.0-1 MFC-J625DW

…and then go through the steps it asks for… license agreements, network ip selection, etc.

Cheers